<?php
/**
 * <https://y.st./>
 * Copyright © 2016 Alex Yst <mailto:copyright@y.st>
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**/

$xhtml = array(
	'<{title}>' => 'PayPal wants unfettered access to my bank account, no doubt for shady reasons.',
	'<{body}>' => <<<END
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2016/11/12.jpg" alt="€2.25 EUR" class="framed-centred-image" width="811" height="480"/>
<p>
	Current countdowns:
</p>
<ul>
	<li>
		234 scheme-specific $a[URI]-parsing classes to write and add to <a href="https://git.vola7ileiax4ueow.onion/y.st./include.d/releases">include.d</a>
	</li>
	<li>
		1 free elective left in my associate degree program
	</li>
	<li>
		4 free electives left in my bachelor degree program
	</li>
</ul>
<p>
	Last night, my dream was even more layered than before.
	I&apos;ve had dreams that contained dreams, but now I had a dream that contained two dreams, each of which contained three dreams.
	It seems too that I&apos;m starting to document my dreams in my dreams.
	Upon actually waking up though, I forgot five of the six most deeply-nested dreams.
	In the sixth though, I was riding my bike and accidentally pulled into the wrong driveway.
	A child asked me if a certain someone was home, so I explained that I had stopped at the wrong house and began to leave.
	They asked if they could borrow a pen, so I handed them one, but then they tried to stab me with it!
	I managed to wrestle it out of their hands, but then in self-defence, I had to stab <strong>*them*</strong> with it, which was horrifying.
	I rode away, but decided to wake up.
	In the dream that I awoke to, I had to go blow my nose.
	That was the extent of that layer of the dream.
	Once I awoke from that, I ended up in the layer where I was trying to get to my laptop so that I could write about my dream.
	On the way to my laptop, I noticed a strange mobile device that I couldn&apos;t make sense of.
	The screen had been left on overnight, but it wasn&apos;t plugged into a power source and hadn&apos;t drained its battery from the prolonged screen use.
</p>
<p>
	I can&apos;t help but wonder if I&apos;m remembering dreams more often because of my recent attempts to document them.
	I woke up way too early, but I haven&apos;t been very productive on the schoolwork front, so I got to work on my <a href="/en/coursework/BUS1101/Leadership_Entrepreneurship_and_Strategy.xhtml">essay</a>.
	Yesterday wasn&apos;t my fault.
	I legitimately didn&apos;t have time.
	On the day before though, I just wasn&apos;t feeling like doing schoolwork, but I should have done it anyway.
</p>
<p>
	On the way to work, I found a small stack of coins outside the grocery store.
	Based on their color, I assumed that they were some sort of tokens, but upon closer inspection, it was actually a pile of euros!
	This wouldn&apos;t be too strange if not for the fact that I&apos;m in the United States; we don&apos;t use euros here.
	Why had someone left €2.25 $a[EUR] outside the store? After work, I photographed the coins that I&apos;d found, though the glare of the sun made a couple of the coins a bit difficult to make out.
	I learned a new trick for dealing with light sources on reflective objects that don&apos;t reflect images (as a mirror would or smooth surface would reflect images).
	By holding my hand on the side of my mobile/camera, using it as a visor, I can block unwanted light!
	If the surface of the object is too reflective though, an image of my hand would show up in the photograph.
	However, it turns out that my mobile&apos;s camera fell from landscape mode to portrait mode and I didn&apos;t notice.
	Once I arrived back home, to my huge disappointment, all of my good photographs were flipped the wrong way.
	I tried to take new photographs, but the sun had gone down too much.
	There wasn&apos;t enough light.
	Likewise, without light, I couldn&apos;t take a photograph of something else and photograph the euros tomorrow.
	I can&apos;t edit them either due to the way that $a[JPEG] compression works.
	When $a[JPEG] images are edited and saved, new data is lost each time.
	Editing one of the good photographs would deteriorate it.
	Instead, I had to include one of the photographs with glare in today&apos;s journal entry.
	I have learned my lesson.
	Always be sure that my mobile&apos;s camera is reading in the correct orientation before photographing something when the subject matter is directly below the camera.
</p>
<p>
	My first task at work today was to stuff the crusts of some stuffed crust deep dish pizzas, something that I&apos;ve not done before.
	Before I quit my job there about a year ago, I used to often joke that one day we&apos;d have a stuffed crust deep ddish pizza, but I never thought that that would actually happen.Working with the deep dish dough is kind of gross, and not just because of the handling of meat and cheese.
	The dough for that pizza is covered in oil, so pretty quickly after starting my task, my hands felt ...
	unpleasant.
</p>
<p>
	I discovered a quicker way to use the credit card machine.
	When I last worked here, we didn&apos;t use the chips in credit cards.
	We simply swiped the card, be it a chip card or a non-chip card.
	However, these days, our chip reader (which was present even back then) is now in use.
	However, it takes several seconds to do anything, which leaves me feeling awkward, as the customer is pretty much just sitting there waiting for the transaction to take place.
	However, it seems that the several second wait can be avoided.
	Instead of swiping the card (required even for the chip-based cards), entering the transaction amount, then inserting the card into the chip reader when told to, I can swipe the card, insert it into the reader, then enter the transaction amount.
	The several-second wait doesn&apos;t need to occur <strong>*after*</strong> the transaction amount has been decided, so it can occur at the same time as I&apos;m using the $a[PIN] pad to specify the price.
	By the time that I&apos;ve finished entering the price, the waiting period is usually over.
</p>
<p>
	The crown of voices was driving me nuts today.
	Many of the voices are difficult to make out, and when the drive-through is busy, the crown beeps in my ear repeatedly while I&apos;m trying to deal with the current customer.
	I&apos;m starting to get the hang of the thing though, so by putting the next customer on hold, I can actually make the beeping go away, but I hadn&apos;t started doing that until later in my shift.
	Even if I do make the beeping go away, the crown&apos;s speaker stays on as long as a customer is at the menu board, again making it difficult to hear the customer that&apos;s actually at the window.
	Furthermore, the crown blocks use of one of my ears.
	Almost no sound seems to get through, and I often can&apos;t make out what my coworkers say even if they&apos;re right next to me.
	I can&apos;t tell the management how annoying the crown is though.
	With the way that we have the tip system set up, we only receive tips if we work a till.
	If I don&apos;t work the drive-through (or the front counter, but I hardly ever end up being assigned to work the front counter), I make less money.
	I will deal with it and I&apos;ll try to get used to it.
</p>
<p>
	Many customers are fine, don&apos;t get me wrong, but a few are just idiots.
	One customer today was splicing the names of different menu items together, confusing me as to what they were after.
	It reminded me a lot of customers that I&apos;ve dealt with in the past.
	In the past, every few days, I&apos;d receive an order for &quot;cheesy breadsticks&quot;; we have no such menu item, and to the best of my knowledge, we never did.
	What many of them are after is actually our cheese bread.
	Yes, our cheese breads are cut into strips, but that doesn&apos;t make them breadsticks.
	If I pulled out a loaf of bread and cut the slices into strips, would that be breadsticks?
	No!
	Most certainly not!
	The word &quot;breadsticks&quot; does not refer to strips of bread, but bread that has been baked into a long, thin shape.
	We also sell breadsticks, which do have a light dusting of Parmesan cheese power, but when I ask customers if that&apos;s what they want, they almost always tell me that it&apos;s not.
	That &quot;almost&quot; makes it worse, too.
	It&apos;s not consistent, as they&apos;re using invalid menu item names, so I can&apos;t for sure know what they mean by &quot;cheesy breadsticks&quot; at any given time.
	Less bad was when customers would order a diet to drink.
	A diet? Really? I can&apos;t sell you a diet, that doesn&apos;t make sense.
	What they really wanted was a <strong>*diet cola*</strong>.
	It&apos;s amazing how many people would just call it a &quot;diet&quot; though.
	Sadly, we only carried one diet drink.
	I&apos;d love to have been able to ask &quot;A diet what?&quot;, but instead, I&apos;d always ask &quot;Do you mean a diet cola?&quot;.
</p>
<p>
	I decided that I can&apos;t avoid the house with the scary person from yesterday in it, at least not by daylight.
	I need to keep an eye on my surroundings.
	Part of that means keeping an eye on suspicious places near my home.
	If I notice anything that seems out of the ordinary, I need to let the police know.
	Furthermore, I can&apos;t let that person think that they can intimidate people and keep them from using public sidewalks.
	Still, I need to avoid the place at night.
	Not only am I unable to see much at night, so there&apos;s nothing that I can witness and report, it&apos;s easier to sneak up on me at night.
	As long as the sun is out, it&apos;s much easier for me to see people that approach and it&apos;s easier for other people to see if I&apos;m under attack.
	With both of those in mind, people are less likely to attack in the day, especially on a public street (as opposed to an alleyway or the inside of an uncrowded building).
</p>
<p>
	This part-time job is cutting into my coursework time more than expected.
	This is the third day, and I&apos;ve still gotten next to nothing done.
	Thank goodness I&apos;m only in one course right now.
	After moving, I need to try to find a job in which I can work only two or three days each week tops.
	The inconsistent schedule at this job doesn&apos;t help either.
	It didn&apos;t used to bother me too much, but now, it&apos;s really causing problems.
	For example, for this work week, I have three days off.
	However, due to the way this work week and last work week were scheduled and the fact that the school week is offset from the work week, I only have two days off from work this school week.
	What a pain.
</p>
<p>
	I received a letter from PayPal telling me that my statement for last moth is ready.
	That seemed to be kind of strange, as I don&apos;t use my PayPal account.
	I clicked the link, wary of the fact that the host of the $a[URI] wasn&apos;t PayPal&apos;s usual domain name, but when I clicked the link on the page that said that it&apos;d show me the statement, it sent me to PayPal&apos;s real main website to log in.
	From there, the login form wouldn&apos;t allow me to access my account though without having PayPal call me by telephone to be sure that I was me!
	What kind of idiocy is this?
	Like with several other large websites, there is no way to turn this antifeature off.
	What are those of us without telephone service supposed to do? That doesn&apos;t even touch the fact that telephone lines aren&apos;t secure, so any &quot;security&quot; feature that uses them isn&apos;t actually secure.
	I contacted PayPal support about the log in issue, though before they got back to me, I realized that the letter from PayPal was addressed to my real name, not my legal name.
	For idiotic policy reasons, my PayPal account is under my legal name.
	I double-checked the email, and sure enough, it was sent to the email address that I use for non-account transactions.
	After speaking with the support representative, they told me that the letter telling me that my statement is available is just a ploy to try to get me to &quot;upgrade&quot; my PayPal guest account into a full PayPal account.
	Unless I upgrade, I can&apos;t actually view the statement, so the claims that I have a statement ready for viewing are a blatant lie.
</p>
<p>
	All the while that I was waiting for responses from PayPal to each of my own responses to them, I was repeatedly trying to log into my account.
	Once in logged into my account, I browsed around a bit, making sure to check the page listing past transactions.
	I&apos;m not even sure why I did that though, seeing as there has never been any payment method associated with that account.
	While looking around, I spotted a link that I&apos;d looked for before, but had concluded did not exist: an account deletion link!
	I&apos;d done some Web searching even, but I only found information saying that for my account type, the only way to delete the account was to contact PayPal support and have them delete it.
	I actually spotted the link just as I was about to contact PayPal support again and try to get them to delete it, too.
	After clicking the link, PayPal tried to convince me not to delete the account about four times, then when that failed, PayPal &quot;limited&quot; my account, and they don&apos;t allow account holders to delete limited accounts.
	As soon as I switched pages to try to find the cause of the limitation, I received a notification telling me that the limitation had taken place.
	In other words, there&apos;s zero chance that the limitation had been there previously and I had just come in contact with it because I had tried to delete the account.
	There is no mistaking the fact that the account wasn&apos;t limited <strong>*until*</strong> I tried to delete it.
	To remove the account limitations, PayPal insists that I both provide some sort of proof of identity as well as give them unfettered access to my bank account.
	Fat chance!
	If you recall from last time that I dealt with this sort of problem with PayPal, and you probably don&apos;t because the pages of my journal from that period were lost due to <a href="/en/weblog/2015/03-March/07.xhtml">hard drive failure</a>, I outright refuse to hand PayPal the keys to any financial account of mine.
	Demanding identification crosses a line that they shouldn&apos;t cross, but I complied then and I complied now.
	However, last time, PayPal already had access to my credit card information.
	They had a way to charge me, but they were demanding access to my bank account anyway.
	There was no legitimate reason for them to have access to my credit union account (I had no bank account at the time).
	My only thought is that they must have been trying to steal money from my bank account.
	Nothing has changed, aside from the fact that this account has no credit card attached to it.
	I <strong>*will not*</strong> hand PayPal my credit union or bank credentials.
	I have contacted PayPal support once more, explaining the situation and explaining that I both provided my state-issued photo $a[ID] and refuse to provide access to my bank account.
	I&apos;m surprised that they talked to me at all on a Saturday though, and they probably won&apos;t get back to me until Monday on this issue.
</p>
<p>
	Doing a little research on euro coins, I learned that while the back of each euro coin of a specific denomination, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org./wiki/Euro_coins#National_sides">the fronts of the coins vary from country to country</a>.
	While the coins are valid legal tender in all member nations of the euro area, each country is authorized to mint their own coins.
	Not only that, but each country chooses their own designs for the fronts of the coins that they mint.
	Interesting!
</p>
<p>
	My <a href="/a/canary.txt">canary</a> still sings the tune of freedom and transparency.
</p>
END
);
